The last post, on the 10th, was left hanging. The implication was that the celebrations at Bulford were because no big lump of a meteor entered the atmosphere, and therefore there was no airburst or fiery conflagration. In other words, earth had passed the dense phase of the summer Taurids and had entered the long period where the annual meteor shower was simply something happening in the upper atmosphere. More intense that a modern meteor shower but a situation that ceased to be frightening – hence the merriment, games, and feasting. Similar activities are known to have occurred – in the landscape around Avebury, for example, as well as at Durrington Walls, within walking distance of Stonehenge. Bulford is around 3 miles distant – and therefore closer to Durrington Walls. Huge numbers of animal bones were found there – mostly pigs. Were they specially reared for these occasions?
One would think the rising of the midsummer sun, or its midwinter opposite, was nothing for our ancestors to become jubilant about. These things come and go. It is when the sun does not rise in all its splendour that worried our ancestors – and other people around the world. In Japanese myth this is quite implicit. The goddess of the sun was hiding n a cave. What on earth could have caused the sun to become unseen – or be dimmed. Thereby causing cold weather and ruining crops. Thee is nothing worse than a frost in June or July but sometimes that can happen. Volcanoes can send huge amounts of gases and debris from an eruption into the upper atmosphere that creates a pale sun, or an opaque sun as some people describe the process. It stands to reason that if the earth passed through a very dense stream of material shed by a passing comet that the sun could also be dimmed – possibly even obscured for a while. An airburst could potentially do the same thing. It is thought it was opaque skies that caused the Little Ice Age in Europe and certainly there are references to unusual sky phenomena.
This kind of thinking is taboo in mainstream circles. The excavators of Tall el-Hammam found that the idea of an ancient airburst event disqualified them from being taken seriously, even though their excavation and finds were incredibly detailed and involved, each summer, huge quantities of pottery being shipped back to their university in the US. Mind you, they also upset the gay community for suggesting the Biblical tale of Sodom had an origin in a real event. The fact that the gay element may not have emerged until the Greek era rather than at the time of the airburst didn’t seem to matter. The excavators never mentioned sex in any shape or form. It didn’t matter. A superb piece of archaeological investigation was dammed as a result of an irrational outcry.
Having digested that we can therefore understand the response of Wessex Archaeology, or rather, that of Matt Leivers, described as a senior research manager. You can find his thoughts at https://www.wessexarch.co.uk/our-work/bulford … he says, in more words than I will type out, that the discovery at Bulford is fundamental because its the earliest example of people building things that aim directly at the solstices. When we talk about the solstice we are talking about religion. About how prehistoric people understood the cosmos, the world, and their place in it. What we see at Bulford, and later at Stonehenge, is a way of celebrating and marking the passage of time … its likely this was a way of saying to their deities, please keep us in mind, keep us warm and safe. It’s a religious event. And so on.
Actually Neolithic monuments do have alignments that involve the Sun – and the moon. And probably the stars or constellations. Some of them predate Bulford – by a mile. Think of Maltese temples and monuments, and those in France and Iberia. It seems the Skyscape teacher – see https://skyscape.academy … was aware of this. In a published paper Silva mentions the Modego river valley in northern Portugal, and mentions megaliths dating from the 4th millennium BC. Michael Hoskin [2001 and 2002] surveyed some of these passage graves and detected variability in their orientation. He attributed this to difference in sunrise when the structures were build. This idea assumes the sun was the focus of interest. Most of them were oriented E to SE and match the positions of sunrise in the winter months of the year. A different approach, he says, is to look not at a single measurement of a supposed axis of symmetry, which is often non existent as these structure do not adhere to such architectural notions, but to look at the range of possible orientations given by the architecture of each structure. This is to say that one can be more confident of finding an alignment if one considers the entirety of the view afforded by the megalithic structures – or the maximum window of visibility. This is rather than accepting any modern western assumptions of where inside this view a celestial object being targeted should be. When this method was deployed a quite different narrative emerged. The visibility was dominated by the mountains of Serra da Estria,in the visibility of all the megalithic sites in the valley [on the Upper Mondego}. Secondly, there is a pattern in the sense that all the maximum windows overlap in the azimuth range 98-111, suggesting that if there was a celestial object being intentionally targeted by all the structures it would have to rise within that tight azimuthal band. Within this band, there are no significant solar or lunar events but the band matches closely the rising of Aldebaran in the constellation of Taurus, one of the brightest stars in the night sky. More importantly, within the phase of megalithic construction in the region. Aldebaran is very bright = the bulls eye. The eye of Taurus the bull. Is that a coincidence?